So now that Wizard has successfully defended his dissertation (I wrote “situation” originally.  Am I alone in finding this hilarious?), and is a DOCTOR, but not the kind that makes a lot of $$$, we’ve been trying this thing where as soon as he gets home from work I pass him The Baby, and he takes over for the evening while I go out to work.

The result of this has mainly been that I am spending too much money/caloric intake on cafe sandwiches.  But I also manage to get some stuff written, sometimes.  On good days.  Because you know what? Kid or no kid, writing is HARD.  Just as hard as it ever was.  When I think about my project, when I envision it as a whole in its parts and its potential smartness, I’m happy.  I’m energized.  But OH the slog to get it there, to the whole as it is in my head.

In other news, Sir Baby has started daycare.  Well, okay, he went to daycare for two hours on Thursday while Wizard hovered in the lobby and joined him on his walk.  He likes it so far, if we can take “like” to mean that he didn’t cry too much and was easily quieted by the plethora of daycare ladies, all of whom envy his eyelashes. (Incidentally, the kid is a looker.  If he didn’t spring forth whole from my own vagina, I’d swear he wasn’t mine.)

Which goddess was it who popped out of Zeus’s head whole?  Athena?  Yes.

I was thinking today how I wished the dissertation had a biological-imperative component.  Like, I wish my diss director would lop off one of my fingers if I didn’t turn in the chapter on time. I know I’ve mentioned this before, how a dissertation is not at all like a baby because, well, the baby HAS to come out, one way or another.  It simply must.  There is no alternative.  But not so for dissertations.

(Oh, wow, sidenote:  There’s a ten-year-old talking about the South Beach Diet across the room from me.  Jeez.  I mean, we’re just moving on to squash with my kid, so I know nothing of pre-teen nutrition.  But I’m thinking it’s a big N-O to South Beach.)

Anyway, I need to in-eloquently end this post so I can use my three hours wisely.  But I think it’s fair to consider this pre-writing, right?

I’ve written a page in a week.  I cannot work in short bursts.  I cannot.  I try, but I can’t write.  I can think, and jot, but not compose.

Translation: I am seriously fucked.

My advisor, bless her “no babies before dissertations!” heart, has been nothing but absolutely supportive.  She’s a feminist theorist, so I had every right to expect this, but you never know what you’re going to get, especially since she told me DON’T GET PREGNANT after I got married.

Which is weird, come to think of it, because of everyone in our program getting married, I was the least likely to get pregnant.  What I mean is that I didn’t come across, I don’t think, like a family planner (which makes sense because the pregnancy wasn’t planned).  Of everyone around me having these big Christian t0-do weddings and buying houses and changing last names, I had a quick and dirty Unitarian ceremony followed by ice cream cake.  Kept my last name, as well as the apartment Wizard and I lived in before getting married.  I didn’t seem like the reproducing type, is what I’m sayin’.  But tell that to my left ovary.  (Did I mention that I know the pregnancy came from the ovary on the left?  It did.  Weird.)

Anyway, she wanted a chapter before the baby, and I didn’t produce (ha).  So I tried to get something together over the summer, but I failed.  She said this was fine because “it’s normal to need some time to get your bearings.”  But now that I’m back at work, she is laying down the law.  And she’s right.  I need rules.  I need someone to tell me DO IT NOW.  She has gladly played the role of hand-holder and hair-smoother for the past few months, but…I’m running down the clock.  And I can’t reasonably expect her to be patient and okay my slow slip into dissertation-abandonment.

I wish Godzilla  (that’s what he’s nicknamed for now.  You are welcome to suggest far-better alternatives) were more cooperative.  Yes, I know, he’s a BABY.  Cooperation is beyond his control.  But right now, for example, he is sitting on my lap, just barely keeping it together without my undivided attention (and even so, I have to stop every few seconds to re-engage him in a mirror game of “who’s the baby?”).  He won’t nap unless he’s on me, which for a while meant I was neutralized in the afternoon.  Just recently he’s started napping on me in a sling, which means I can work if I do so quietly and don’t move too much.  Ever since his cold he has refused to sleep in the crib for more than a few hours at a time, and after 2 am he’s done with the crib completely.  Wizard keeps insisting that we’ve gotten screwed in the Cosmic Baby Habits Lottery, that he is just far more difficult and time consuming than the average baby, but I know that’s not true because I read you guys (Hi, Accidents!) and know you’re soldiering through these messes, too.

But, yeah.  Won’t sleep in the crib.  Must nap on me.  Won’t spend more than 20 minutes entertaining himself (even though on a car trip he once entertained himself for TWO HOURS with a book about puppies.  Where the hell did that baby go?)  Hates to sleep and won’t settle down without lots of cuddles and walking about.  Oh, and I’m pretty sure he learned how to control his pee stream, because he squirts me, just a wee little bit, at every change.

Oh, and solids?  Damn, it takes a long time to feed these guys.

So go ahead and report me to protective services now, because I’ve basically listed out all the normal behaviors of infants and said they’re too much for me to handle.  But they wouldn’t be, if I didn’t have the whole “thinking thoughts and writing them down” thing going on.  I’d be fine if I could get two or three working hours in a row, but that’s not going to happen.  I was silly to think it would.

I’ve been whining a lot here, so it’s only right to follow up that behavior with a plea.  Are you a short-bursts writer?  Can you pump out a paragraph in 20 minutes or less?   That is, after being interrupted, can you pick up where you left off?  How do you do it?  I need writing strategies and would appreciate anything you’ve got.

My mother-in-law is here, and will be in-residence through the middle of October.

Ahem.

I don’t go in for the classic MIL hatred partly because it’s a bullshit girl-on-girl crime sort of thing, a relationship shortcut that refuses to recognize the reality of female relationships in their full range of animosity/love.  Partly I just don’t have that kind of relationship with her, either.  I’ve spoken before of the reasons she intimidates me, and in general I have a hard time talking to her because I fear pissing her off, but I don’t dislike her.

However.  She’s been getting on my last damn nerve due to her constant not-quite-criticism of our parenting (i.e. she never tells me anything, but she tells the baby what she thinks.  Infuriating?  OH HELL YES).

First of all, the baby (whatever his nickname is, let’s go with Wizito, “little Wiz”), Wizito (I hate that, I’ll be changing it later), is four and a half months old.  There’s not a whole hell of a lot of “parenting” to be seen here.  You take care of a baby, you love the heck out of him, you provide mental stimulation…and you’re pretty much done.  It’s not like we have to figure out when to have the sex talk or how to set up cell phone rules.  Yet apparently we’re already screwing up.  He has too many toys.  He shouldn’t nap on me.  There’s other stuff, but she’s not saying it in English, so who the hell knows.  Oh, and we also need a second car, according to her, and a nanny.

A fucking nanny.  Like we live on the UES and can hire Fran Drescher.  Which would be kind of awesome, come to think of it, because she’s really funny, but the point is I’m a graduate student.  I can be a nanny, but I can’t HAVE a nanny.  This has spawned a joke between my brother and me regarding the opportunity for him to quit his job and come to live with us, Tony Danza style.  He would cook, do some light cleaning, watch The Baby, and provide comic relief for MIL, who I suppose would fill the Mona slot. Which makes me, what?  Not Angela–that’s a tad too incestuous for my taste.  So…Sam, I guess.  Which means I have to go bra shopping with my brother, and he has to have a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove at all times.

(BTW: the lyrics to the “Who’s the Boss?” theme song?  Trite yet profound.)

In the midst of this I have a due date for the draft of my first chapter:  mid-October.  And it isn’t even a loose due date.  I joined a diss writing group, so I have to produce something real and readable in a little under six weeks.  My director wants me to focus on producing six pages a week, which means that by her watch, I should have something by mid-October as well.

So.  There you go.  I’m supposed to write a chapter while Mona is here.  Oh!  And Wizard is supposed to finish HIS diss and defend by then, too.  It is an academic disaster of sitcom proportions, I tell you.

I don’t know how to write a dissertation after having a baby.  I truly don’t.  But I titled the post as such to lure here those of my ilk, the other parents and caregivers of children who have dissertations to write and babies to raise.

See, every once in a while I google that phrase above, and I get some crap from the Berkeley something or other network (nice people, it seems, but they are different from me in that they have access to nannies who themselves have access to public transportation), and advertisement websites from dissertation coaches.  I’ve yet to find people blogging about the hell I’m currently in, the hell of my own making, which for me can be defined as wanting to lay on the couch and stare at the baby as he figures out how to use his fingers when what I really need to be doing is working.

I don’t think childrearing-while-dissertating is that different from any number of “personal issues”–caregiving, illness, divorce, dating, whatever–that chew up your brain.  Kids are just one branch on a particularly gnarled tree.  But.  It does have its particulars–difficult sleep schedules, absence of solid blocks of writing time, occasional guilt, whatever–and man do I wish there were more folks blogging about those particulars.  It’s hard enough to find dissertation bloggers as it is (hi, PauvrePlume!), let alone dissertating parents.

I know, though, that we’re out there.  So if you’ve come here looking for an answer re: living a human life while managing a (sometimes inhuman[e]) academic task, I don’t have it.  But you should stick around anyway.

Yeah, I know.  But I’ve been absent for a month.  That’s not good.  And as an education professional, I believe in assignments-as-motivation.  Sure, self-motivation is great, but we can’t all be well-adjusted adults.

More later on just what the hell has been going on.

I don’t talk much about pop culture here, probably because I’m too busy whining about school and work and stuff. On that tip: still working on the diss. proposal. Made it through one “bad” draft which was, I kid you not, faulted mostly for being badly written as opposed to full of bad ideas. Now working on the second half of the second draft which is not so bad, actually. By the way, it is very, very embarrassing to be told you “write toward your thesis” when you are an old-tyme grad student who has taught writing, including how not to write toward one’s thesis, for four years. (How not to write toward your thesis: either 1) spend ridiculous amounts of time outlining and drafting your intro so your thesis/writing plan is solid and just needs to be carried out; or 2) write with demon-speed, finally figure out what your thesis is after writing the whole paper, and then revise like hell to make sense of the thing.) My problem? I am normally the type who follows method one, but in this case I followed method two, only with minimal revising. Bad, bad Perpetua.

So while I am quite the reality television junkie, and could tell you right now why this season’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge is a radical feminist paradigm (but not in the way you’d hope it to be), I haven’t talked about it much. But I want to post something I read about Kenley, the Project Runway Person I Hate the Most:

Do you remember that girl you knew in college who was fashionable in this timid, darting way. Who things never seemed to go quite right for until they really did and there was something so smug and self-satisfied about her success. And then you’d see her at parties or in the dining hall and she was always talking to boys, only boys, perhaps one out-of-her-league fellow in particular, in this cloying and sad and infuriating way. She would get a little too sloppy at parties and quietly profess her sad love for this boy—who probably played club lacrosse or rowed crew and had some family money and was kind but aloof to her—and she would glare at any girl in a shrill passive aggressive way if she felt encroached upon. That girl was someone you felt bad for, sure, but mostly you couldn’t stand her. Because she was a poor representative of Women….

Clearly I’m not alone in my feelings about Kenley, but any time a lot of people are hating on a woman, you have to pause and ask why. Why the hatred of Hillary Clinton? Of Sarah Palin? Of Tzipi Livni? I’m not trying to equate reality stars with politicians (though why shouldn’t I, really). It’s just that, when the media turns against a female, I start to worry. When I share that hatred, I worry more.

So, what is it? Is she simply annoying, in which case I’m entitled to dislike her? Yes, partly. Does she remind me of this blog I used to read, written by a woman whose life I followed like a soap opera until she up and made her blog password-protected, leaving me with no end to the story arc?** Oh, yes indeedy.

What bothers me, and what the quote above helped me realize, is that Kenley exhibits a very specifically defined female brand of power. That is, Kenley Is A Girl. She defines and is defined by her girlhood, by whining and giggling and backstabbing and bitching her way through each challenge. That may not be who she is, but that’s what television makes of her. And she may be a talented designer, but her designs are secondary aspects of her personality, a personality I can’t stand in part because I feel that the show is taking a step backward for the first time in its history. PR was the rare reality show that featured designers who happen to be male/female/gay/straight/of color/of size/etc. Kenley might be the show’s first Girl, and everyone hates her.

I hope we hate her for the right reason: because her personality, like her style, is dated. Kenley designs for and designs herself as a retro 40s pinup-in-the kitchen-type. The Bettie Page type. Bettie Page was a quasi-feminist icon because she exemplified sexual power and claimed it for women. But that was only one (necessary but partial) step toward selfhood. To locate power solely there is a mistake, and we all know it. That’s the kind of thing that leads to the femme fatale, to Girls Gone Wild, to a notion of female power as tied directly and only to powerful sexuality. And it’s a trap, I tell you. A god-damned trap. Because what should be about empowerment ends up being about service. And sadly, we’re not talking self-serve here.

***It sort of doesn’t fit with the narrative, but that blogger was fascinating, though probably for the wrong reasons. She was able to tell great stories about her mundane life, which is why I kept reading. But she also did fucked up sorts of things, like having NSA sex with dudes who had girlfriends. I don’t know why I’m alone in thinking that it’s shitty to do that to other women. Yes, OF COURSE, it’s totally the guy’s fault for cheating. And if they hadn’t been with her, then they would have found a dozen other women. But still. Powerful sexuality shouldn’t involve fucking a dude and then laughing at his girlfriend when you see the couple together. That’s just some straight-up nasty anti-female shit. Feel free to disagree, though. I hold this opinion strongly, but blindly.

I tried but failed to get this Wordle thing working earlier in the day. Turns out everyone else makes theirs look pretty by using a screenshot instead of the page code.

Word clouds remind me of those games you play when you’re a kid, the ones where you randomly point at a word on a page to predict your future.  Or spin a globe wildly, skid it to a stop with a fingernail, and declare Namibia your future home.  It’s funny, though, that the two most popular words on this blog are “like” and “work.”  Do I really use “like” that much, and if so, is it in the “I enjoy” way, or the “as like than resembles” way, or the “like, you know” way?  All of them?

In the English department where I got my M.A., there was an edict against “sort of,” “kind of,” and “like.”  Some people took this so seriously that they had little decals on their office doors with those words imprisoned behind the universal symbol for “no.”  In my theory class, answers employing “kind of” or “like” would be ignored sometimes (or else the prof would wait silently for a correction).  I suppose you need to get rid of the qualifiers when discussing lit theory, lest you end up going around in larger-than-normal-circles.  Is it deconstruction, like deconstruction, or, like, deconstruction?  But the truth is that none of this was about clarity.  It was about elitism.  It was about making college-educated kids (and grad students) sound like they were college-educated kids.  The department didn’t account for the growth and change of the language.  If the language was, like, changing, then they would stand against that change.  I think I was annoyed by all of this at the time; I can’t remember.   But I followed the rules.

I use “like” too much.  Elitism aside, I need to start straining it out of the soup of my speech.  When I was in middle school, I was made fun of for speaking too properly.  This is strange not just because I went to school with a bunch of upper-middle-class kids, all of whom shared my or a similar background and therefore, one would assume, my pattern of speech, but also because, hey, I also had big plastic glasses and a bad perm, and I was getting shit because I spoke in complete and correct sentences?  Damn.  From that point on I started consciously slipping “like” into my conversations, but it didn’t fit at first.  My consciousness of the word, of what it meant, and of how it altered the contours of my speech, made me sound like what I was: a foreigner to a language that was my own.  No matter how close your accent, the natives always know.

Check it out: Moon Unit Zappa “singing” “Valley Girl”:

Also: this neat post on “kind of” and “sort of” over at Motivated Grammar.

Further evidence of my ever-deteriorating writing skills: over-reliance on dashes and dots. I don’t seem to pay attention to the “better” ways of linking phrases.  I just represent thinking with an ellipsis, conclusions with a dash. Perhaps it’s the blog’s fault.  I’m “thinking out loud” here in a way I normally wouldn’t (even my emails are better composed in real life).  Or maybe my brain is just broken.

I wish I were feeling more coherent this morning, because I’d really like to talk about Ciaran Carson.  Carson is an Irish poet who writes about “The Troubles” among other things.  His poems are at my apartment, and I’m not at my apartment, so you’ll have to settle for a quote.  This is Carson thinking about a photograph of a street riot:

No, don’t trust maps, for they avoid the moment…Though if there is an ideal map…it may exist in the eye of the helicopter ratcheting overhead [...]  Or it may exist in photographs [Carson quotes the photo's caption].  But the caption is inaccurate:  The camera has caught only one rioter in the act…. The others, these would-be or has-been or may-be rioters, have momentarily become spectators, as their protagonist does his David-and-Goliath act; some might be talking about the weather, which seems unusually grey for July, or maybe this is a bad print; some others are looking down Bosnia street at what is happening or might happen next.  The left-hand frame of the photograph only allows us the ‘nia of Roumania Street, so I don’t know what’s going on there, but I’m trying to remember-was I there that night, on this street littered with half-bricks, broken glass, a battered saucepan and a bucket?

He is fodder for the dissertation, he is, he is…